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Amsterdam

The best-selling author of Atonement and Enduring Love, Ian McEwan is known as one of contemporary fiction’s most acclaimed writers. This Booker Prize-winning novel by McEwan finds two men connecting at the funeral of their ex-lover. Distressed by how she was slowly destroyed by an illness, the two make a pact to save each other from enduring such a fate.

Saturday

New York Times best-selling author Ian McEwan's novels have inspired sweeping critical acclaim and won such prestigious awards as the Booker Prize for Amsterdam and the National Book Critics Circle Award for his modern masterpiece, Atonement. With Saturday, McEwan has crafted perhaps his most unique achievement to date.

Nutshell

From the best-selling author of Atonement, Nutshell is a classic story of murder and deceit, told by a narrator with a perspective and voice unlike any in recent literature. A bravura performance, it is the finest recent work from a true master. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour is just a speck in the universe of possible things?

The Innocent

War-weary Berlin has much to offer Leonard Markham, a young, naive postal engineer: first the arts of sophisticated intrigue, then the delights of sexual pleasure. But Leonard's new knowledge carries a heavy price, dragging him and the listener into a new type of story that is exhaustively suspenseful and utterly irresistible.

Enduring Love

On a sunny afternoon, the middle-aged writer Joe Rose and his wife look up from their picnic in the countryside to see an elderly man desperately trying to anchor his giant helium balloon. Running to help, Joe is joined by other bystanders. But from that fateful day, one of them, Jed Parry, will begin to stalk Joe. Driven by religious zeal and misdirected love, the strange young man will slowly unravel each strand of Joe's life.

Sweet Tooth

Winner of such prestigious honors as the Booker Prize and Whitbread Award, Ian McEwan is justifiably regarded as a modern master. Set in 1972, Sweet Tooth follows Cambridge student Serena Frome, whose intelligence and beauty land her a job with England's intelligence agency, MI5. In an attempt to monitor writers' politics, MI5 tasks Serena with infiltrating the literary circle of author Tom Healy. But soon matters of trust and identity subvert the operation.

White Teeth

Archie's life has disintegrated. Fresh from a dead marriage, middle-aged Archie stretches out a vacuum hose, seals up his car and prepares to die. But unbeknownst to him, his darkest hour is also his luckiest day. With the opening of a butcher's shop, his life is saved and soon he is on his way to beginning a new life with a young Jamaican woman looking for the last man on earth.

After a violent coup in the United States overthrows the Constitution and ushers in a new government regime, the Republic of Gilead imposes subservient roles on all women. Offred, now a Handmaid tasked with the singular role of procreation in the childless household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife, can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost everything, even her own name.

The Children Act

Fiona Maye is a High Court judge in London presiding over cases in family court. She is fiercely intelligent, well respected, and deeply immersed in the nuances of her particular field of law. Often the outcome of a case seems simple from the outside, the course of action to ensure a child's welfare obvious. But the law requires more rigor than mere pragmatism, and Fiona is expert in considering the sensitivities of culture and religion when handing down her verdicts.

The Blind Assassin

With The Blind Assassin, Atwood proves once again that she is one of the most talented, daring, and exciting writers of the time. Like The Handmaid's Tale, this Book Prize-winner is destined to become a classic.

Middlesex

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop physically - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.

Beloved

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but 18 years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Never Let Me Go

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.

The Comfort of Strangers

New York Times best-selling author Ian McEwan has won the Booker Prize, Whitbread Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for his masterfully accomplished fiction. The Comfort of Strangers is an exquisitely crafted gothic novella. On holiday, Colin and Maria wander the ancient streets of Venice and frequently lose their way. When they are accosted by a man with a strange and alluring story to tell, they soon become entwined in a fantasy of violence and erotic obsession.

Magpie Murders: A Novel

When editor Susan Ryeland is given the manuscript of Alan Conway's latest novel, she has no reason to think it will be much different from any of his others. After working with the best-selling crime writer for years, she's intimately familiar with his detective, Atticus Pünd, who solves mysteries disturbing sleepy English villages. An homage to queens of classic British crime such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, Alan's traditional formula has proved hugely successful.

The English Patient

With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminates this audiobook like flashes of heat lightening.

The Wings of the Dove

Milly Theale is a young, beautiful, and fabulously wealthy American. When she arrives in London and meets the equally beautiful but impoverished Kate Croy, they form an intimate friendship. But nothing is as it seems: materialism, romance, self-delusion, and ultimately fatal illness insidiously contaminate the glamorous social whirl.

When We Were Orphans

Christopher Banks, an English boy born in early-20th-century Shanghai, is orphaned at age nine when both his mother and father disappear under suspicious circumstances. He grows up to become a renowned detective, and more than 20 years later, returns to Shanghai to solve the mystery of the disappearances.

True History of the Kelly Gang

Ned Kelly's name resonates in Australia the same way the name Jesse James does in America. Was he a crusading folk hero or murderous horse thief and bank robber? Who was the real Ned Kelly? As the impoverished son of an Irish convict, Kelly was cheated, lied to, and abused by the English. Committed to fighting back against oppression, Kelly and his gang of outlaws eluded police for nearly two years.

The French Lieutenant's Woman

At Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, a young Victorian amateur palaentologist, Charles Smithson, is struck by a solitary figure standing at the far end of the Cobb, staring out to sea. It is Sarah Woodruff, known to the locals as 'poor Tragedy' since her apparent liaison with a French sailor who has since deserted her. Although Charles is already engaged to a young heiress, he is immediately beguiled and eventually infatuated with Sarah.

The Luminaries

It is 1866 and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky.

Story Structure: The Key to Successful Fiction: The Red Sneaker Writers Book Series, Volume 1

"Writing is structure,” William Goldman said, but too often aspiring writers plunge into their work without grasping this fundamental principle. Story structure is one of the most important concepts for a writer to understand - and ironically, one of the least frequently taught. In this book, New York Times best-selling author William Bernhardt explains the elements that make stories work, using examples spanning from Gilgamesh to The Hunger Games.

Solar

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Michael Beard is fast approaching 60, a mere shell of the academic titan he once was. While his fifth marriage falls apart, Michael suddenly finds himself with an unexpected opportunity to reinvigorate his career and possibly save humankind from the growing threat of global warming.

Masked Ball at Broxley Manor: A Royal Spyness Novella

At the end of her first unsuccessful season out in society, Lady Georgiana has all but given up on attracting a suitable man - until she receives an invitation to a masked Halloween ball at Broxley Manor. Georgie is uncertain why she was invited, until she learns that the royal family intends to marry her off to a foreign prince, one reputed to be mad.

Publisher's Summary

National Book Critics Circle, Fiction, 2003

In Atonement, three children lose their innocence, as the sweltering summer heat bears down on the hottest day in 1935, and their lives are changed forever. Cecilia Tallis is of England's priviledged class; Robbie Turner is the housekeeper's son. In their moment of intimate surrender, they are interrupted by Cecilia's hyperimaginative and scheming 13-year-old sister, Briony. And as chaos consumes the family, Briony commits a crime, the guilt of which she shall carry throughout her life.

What the Critics Say

Book Sense Book of the Year Award Finalist, Adult Fiction, 2003

"A tour de force. Every bit as affecting as it is gripping." (The New York Times) "Enthralling...With psychological insight and a command of sensual and historical detail, Mr. McEwan creates an absorbing fictional world." (The Wall Street Journal) "A beautiful and majestic fictional panorama." (The New Yorker)

Besides providing an interestingly, densely-detailed picture of the attitudes of the well-bred British in the late 30's, McEwan lays bare some of the ways a writer's mind works, in youth and in maturity. You have to be a bit flexible to go along, but it is well worth it! However, for an overall pleasurable reading experience, I would give the edge to McEwan's _Saturday_. Though both books are set in worlds that seem to have gone mad, _Saturday_ is more uplifting for the reader. There is such a sense of foreboding lying over everything in _Atonment_.

I am a frequent audiobook reader and rarely do I find I just can't take the tedium any more and put it down. This book was assigned to my high school senior's literature class and I like to read the same books so we can intelligently discuss them. I put this book away twice in the first ten chapters before I finally mustered the drive to press on. <br/><br/>Chapter 10 is about when things start to happen. In the first part of this book you literally listen for hours and NOTHING happens. We get a description of a 10 year old's daydream, a description of the wallpaper, what the landscape vista looks like, etc. Patience pays off however, and by the time part II starts you start to really care about the characters. <br/><br/>This is basically a 3 part book with an epilogue. The second part gives a vivid description of the early British army in WWII, and part 3 the life of a young nurse in London just before the Dunkirk evacuation. I found the descriptions in these parts to be fascinating. It was almost as if the reader was there.<br/><br/>The epilogue brings it home with the big picture of the whole story. Different reviewers take away different ideas but my thought was how much our lives and the guilt we carry forward our whole lives can rest on the poor decisions made in childhood and our youth. It's a great theme for young people to consider. We never know how even the smallest decision in youth can have a profound effect on our whole lives. <br/><br/>The reader had just the right cadence and accent. Overall, I would recommend this one only for those who don't mind a slowly developing plot and big ideas to consider in the end.

This book was beautifully written. The reader is one of my favorites on audible (she was one of the readers of "The Thirteenth Tale", my favorite audible book to date). The story was long, bittersweet, slow - something to savor over a cup of tea with a warm blanket, or sit on the porch with a cup of coffee. I can't wait to see the movie!

In each section of Atonement, McEwan stretches the listener's nerves like rubber bands, farther and farther, thinner and thinner, until everything's about to snap. Then he stops, and he relaxes into the next section. only to begin the stretching all over again. The workout is mental of course. But it's also physical; the listener's muscles tighten and relax as the action ebbs and flows. The overall effect is stunning. This is the first great novel of the new millennium!

Ok, so I listened for two hours and NOTHING has happened so far. I gave up and stopped listening. Sadly, the description sounds like it will be good but then the part where the three characters supposedly lose their innocence but the event is really a non-event.

The whole story up to this point is overly drawn out descriptions of mundane activities with no clear point or action. I have now seen in other reviews that one should wait until chapter 10 for the plot to get moving but I am quitting after chapter 5. Its just not worth it!

My interests run to psychology, popular science, history, world literature, and occasionally something fun like Jasper Fforde. It seems like the only free time I have for reading these days is when I'm in the car so I am extremely grateful for audio books. I started off reading just the contemporary stuff that I was determined not to clutter up my already stuffed bookcases with. And now audio is probably 90% of my "reading" matter.

This is such a great book but I don't know what I can say about it that won't be too much of a spoiler. It was a mind-opening experience as far as what can be done with the written word. More importantly, in a world where so many people are obsessed with forgiveness, it was refreshing to see someone focus on the other side of that activity. Hence the title of the book. I cannot recommend this highly enough.

Like other reviewers I wondered where we were going for the first six hours. After I finished the book I went back several times and realized that every sentence in the first half describing a day in the life of the characters had a purpose.

What seemed to be meandering was actually taut and direct. The writing hovers between literature and prose. This one stayed with me for days after I finished it.

I had no trouble losing myself in this book. Descriptions and characters are precisely and comprehensively drawn. The author has skillfully crafted each sentence and it's a real treat to read a book that is so well written. The story stands on it own merit. If you savor good literature and language this book will more than satisfy.

For pure entertainment read Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiaasen. Also a skilled author, his works are fast and fun reads.

Not a great fan of McEwan even after reading Enduring Love but I adored the way this was read, the way he writes and as a Brit living in America I could taste the English countryside, hear the sounds of winter bird song and feel the passion of two loyal lovers. No hesitation in recommending this to all that appreciate literature and a good "listen".